Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady

In 1932 Eleanor Roosevelt entered the claustrophobic, duty-bound existence of the first lady with dread. By that time she had put her deep disappointment in her marriage behind her and developed an independent life - now threatened by the public role she would be forced to play. A lifeline came to her in the form of a feisty campaign reporter for the Associated Press: Lorena Hickok. Over the next 30 years, until Eleanor's death, the two women carried on an extraordinary relationship.

Jean the Urban Walker says:"An amazing story of amazing women making waves."

How Should a Person Be?

Reeling from a failed marriage, Sheila, a 20-something playwright, finds herself unsure of how to live and create. When Margaux, a talented painter and free spirit, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, enter her life, Sheila hopes that through close - sometimes too close - observation of her new friend, her new lover, and herself, she might regain her footing in art and life.

Miranda Friedman says:"Heti Succeeds by Writing What She Knows"

Publisher's Summary

From one of America¹s most brilliant critics and cultural commentators comes a long-awaited collection of penetrating autobiographical essays and a riveting short memoir, novelistic in style and ambition, about the pathos, comedy, and devastation of early love.

Stanford professor and longtime contributor to the London Review of Books, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Slate, and other publications, Terry Castle is widely admired for the wit, panache, intellectual breadth, and emotional honesty of her writings on life, literature, and art. Now, at long last, she has collected some of the more personal of her recent essays in a single volume.

Several pieces here are already acknowledged classics: "Desperately Seeking Susan", the celebrated account she wrote in 2005 of her droll and somewhat bittersweet friendship with Susan Sontag; "My Heroin Christmas", a darkly humorous examination of addiction, her family and stepsiblings, and the late, great jazz saxophonist Art Pepper; and the picaresque "Travels with My Mother", a rollicking travelogue that brings together Castle's complicated relationship with her mother, lesbianism, art, and the difficult yet transcendent work of the painter Agnes Martin.

At the center of the collection, however, is the title work, published here for the first time: a candid and wrenching exploration of Castle's relationship, during her graduate school years, with a female professor. At once hilarious and rueful, it is a pitch-perfect recollection of the fiascos of youth: how we come to own (or disown) our sexuality; how we understand (or don't) the emotional needs and wishes of others; how the ordeals of desire can prompt a lifelong search for self-understanding.

In this account of a sentimental education, as in all the essays in The Professor and Other Writings, Terry Castle reveals herself as a truly remarkable writer: utterly distinctive, wise, frank, and fe...

What the Critics Say

"This is the book we Terry Castle fans have been waiting for, and those new to her work are in for a revelation - a brain-goosing, entertaining blast." (James Wolcott)"Critic and cultural commentator Castle delivers a vibrant series of essays on art, travel and the personal relationships in her life....She deftly uses her personal experience to illuminate an array of other subjects....A sharply written, deeply personal collection." (Kirkus Reviews)